A Beginner's Guide to UX/UI Design
What is UX Design?
User experience design, commonly known as UX design, is the process of creating a meaningful and relevant product centered around the needs and desires of a target audience. In other words, UX design is designing how a user interacts with a product.
The role of a UX designer involves research. They must understand how their target audience thinks and feels and how certain features can elicit specific reactions from them. UX design isn't just a one-time solution; it is an ongoing process involving continuously gathering data and user feedback to ensure that the product continues to satisfy expectations as users' needs evolve.
UX designers must advocate for their users’ needs throughout all stages of the design process. They must understand their audience well to develop the best solutions to address their habits, needs, and concerns.
What is UI Design?
User interface design, also known as UI design, focuses on consumers' aesthetic and functional experience. In other words, they create the look and feel of an interface. It is the job of the UI designer to bring the UX designer's vision to life to ensure the creation of a product that is both easy and pleasing to use.
UI designers oversee the colors, text, font, spacing, images, buttons, and all interactive elements of a site. Therefore, UI designers must have a strong understanding of design principles to represent concepts and ideas in a way that is easy for the target audience to understand. They must work with the site's framework to develop a design that is functional, attractive, and aligned with all brand elements on the page.
Why is UX/UI Design Important?
By understanding what drives human behavior, UX and UI designers can design websites and applications that evoke positive experiences and responses from users. Research shows that good UX and UI design improves a consumer's experience and increases sales, user loyalty, and brand equity. The Trillion Dollar UX Problem states that for every $1 invested into UX design, businesses average $100 in return. In other words, UX and UI design can help increase return on investments (ROI).
What makes good UX/UI Design?
While UX and UI design are different, they ensure the creation of a product that enables users to access information or complete tasks in an efficient and pleasing way. You cannot have good UX without good UI.
Good Structure
A well-structured site ensures that users can find everything they need and that the overall experience feels natural. It also makes the site more accessible for individuals with disabilities.
When first structuring your site, keeping your business or brand’s future goals in mind is crucial. The structure of your site should be able to adapt and expand to meet your goals easily.
Communicative
Users should see your product and feel represented when they use it. Show them that you heard their thoughts, ideas, and concerns and considered them when designing the product.
Continuously gather user feedback to ensure your site remains up-to-date and appealing to your target audience. Depending on your site's purpose, a comment section or contact page could help users engage with content more and feel heard.
Concise
Users should be able to understand what your page is about without any difficulty. From navigating through content to reading copy, the user experience should be intuitive.
UX and UI design does not just consider the artistic design and layout of a site but the words as well. Buttons and navigation links should tell users exactly what they do in as few words as possible. Everything should be clear and practical; excess content may confuse users and take away from their overall experience.
Visually Appealing
When your site loads onto a user’s browser, it should entice them to stay on the page and explore its contents. To ensure this happens, make the website’s aesthetics appeal to the target audience.
It is essential to understand what visually appeals to your target audience. After all, people of different ages and cultures respond to colors and imagery differently. Remember to keep the color palette, images, and typography in mind when designing. Use a legible typeface and avoid formatting text in large blocks.
Steps of the Design Process
- Research
- The first step of the design process is gathering data; this involves directly speaking to the target audience to gather information from them. The data can be either qualitative, quantitative, or both. Research allows designers to understand their target audience more and determine the issues they have and the solutions they are seeking. It also enables researchers to see what their competitors are doing to determine what needs to be done to differentiate themselves more from their competition.
- Design
- After analyzing the research gathered in the previous step, this stage is where designers begin to brainstorm potential solutions for users. This may involve sketching ideas, toying with colors, and changing the interface and structure of the site.
- The design stage is where the UI designer comes into play. They help determine color palettes and where buttons, images, and content should be placed. They help UX designers with creating wireframes to help envision what the final product may look like. This step results in multiple sketches and wireframes. Further feedback from key decision-makers and more user testing is needed to determine which design to proceed with, which is done in the next stages.
- Prototype
- In the prototype stage, you create a more realistic mock-up of the final product. The purpose is to create a mock-up that allows individuals to interact with the final product before it is fully developed. It is meant to be used in the validate stage for user testing.
- Validate
- The final stage of the design process involves usability testing to ensure the product is working efficiently and resolves any issues it intends to. After running the final tests on the target demographic, the product will either head back to the design stage to resolve any problems or continue into development. The purpose of this stage is to save time and money to ensure the final product is something consumers want and need.
Careers
UX and UI design are popular careers that are quickly growing in demand. Below are a few examples of jobs individuals with UX and UI skills can get.
UX Researcher
A UX Researcher is analytical and data-driven. They are in charge of conducting experiments and gathering all user data needed for a particular project. They help UX and UI designers understand their target audience by providing them with user insights and other valuable information.
Information Architect
Information architects deal with the organization of a product and ensure that users can navigate from point A to point B in the most logical manner. They work closely with UX researchers and designers to understand users' needs and design the site's hierarchy to match it.
UX/UI Designer
While UX and UI design are different yet related roles, they are often combined in job listings and used interchangeably. Smaller companies typically do this and ask individuals to fulfill both roles. For jobs like this, read what responsibilities you will be asked to satisfy to understand if it is something you want to do.
Front-end Developer
Front-end developers are responsible for how a website or application looks. They are responsible for coding the site using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; however, they must have a good understanding of UX and UI design principles to ensure effective design.
Conclusion
UX and UI design are used interchangeably, yet they encompass different roles in the design process. While it is vital to understand their differences, it is just as important to realize that you cannot have one without the other. Good UX depends on good UI and vice versa. They must work together to ensure users have favorable experiences using a product.
View my my GitHub repo here